“We have invested all our effort, time and money into the development of the Bitcoin economy. We agree that mining should be decentralised, but you cannot blame GHash.IO for being the #1 mining pool.”

CoinTelegraph reported last week on the community uproar in response to history repeating itself. At the time, no response could be heard from Ghash.io, and no official statement has been released to this date.

The pool did release comments following the first instance of mining power imbalance in January, which focussed mainly on reiterating its commitment to the stability of the Bitcoin network, but Smith’s comments this time provide little reassurance.

Indeed, using popularity to shed a positive light on undesirable power is a technique used by many an indicted enterprise in times gone by, and Cryptocoinsnews notes that Ghash.io has “yet to fulfil [the] basic promise” put forward in its own mitigation plan six months ago.

In the plan, “Ghash.io promised to allow Cex.io customers point their hashing power towards other pools to mitigate the blatant centralization of mining power under one pool,” but as recent events have shown, there is as yet no progress in this direction.

Smith, however, mentions that the pools will “soon ... present a valid solution to this problem.” Whether this will take the form of that which was previously promised is yet to be seen, but an alternative solution to limiting raw mining power seems difficult to envisage.